Today [The Glass Menagerie] seems to stand as squarely in [an exhausted] realistic tradition as if it were a small-town Beaux Arts bank building. Although it is often praised for its lyricism and delicate fragility, Menagerie now looks glued together with self-pity, soft at the core, less a tragedy than an overexquisite lace-doily melodrama.

What has kept Menagerie being produced year after year—aside from its people-pleasing sentimentality and safely low-key lyricism—are its well-turned-out roles for actors. (p. 92)